Friday, 2 September 2011

Conversation With Grandma

Well, he lip reads and responds to everything with his thumbs up. He can laugh though, he laughs all the time. I’m quite fond of him. Anyway, he’s coming to dig a grave for Hollie in the garden. She was put down this morning; she had a good life. Have you ever dug a grave? Hard work that. Makes you really respect gravediggers.

I never feel like a poet around Grandma, I rarely know what to say.

I can’t lie, I’ve been crying all night. I’m going to miss Hollie. Hope I don’t get too many lonely moments without her. I ate chicken earlier and couldn’t help but feel strange to be mourning Hollie while eating a dead animal. You get to be old as me and life still surprises you. I hope when I get to heaven I get my young body back. See that picture of me on the mantelpiece? That’s me at 22. I was in love with a man called Keith. He was so handsome, taller than you. Always wore grey jackets and trimmed his moustache. I’d say kissing a man without a moustache is like eating a boiled egg without salt. He took that photo, I’m smiling because he asked me a naughty question, I shan’t repeat it. You don’t appreciate beauty when you’ve got it. You shouldn’t put so much pride into things that fade. Life is full of sad things and happy things. The sad things are important; they give you compassion, which in the end gives you more to be happy about. Everyone I went to school with is dead. I’m at the age where every day is a bonus. You get those phone calls, oh’ Mavis died, oh’ Elizabeth died and you just sit there with your life behind you. I believe in a spirit world though, a place for the good and a place for the bad. I can’t see Hitler’s spirit in the same place as my friends. Then again, if Germany wasn’t on the brink of starvation after the First World War it wouldn’t have bred such evil. That’s just my opinion though. How’s your poetry going?

I tell her it’s ok.

Don’t you find the more you talk to people the more you realise how important words are? I used to be part of an organisation called Talking Books. We’d read books to blind people. Each book took a while to read out loud but it did so much for them. One man I read to told me, when you live in the dark your only light is a good story. Are you hungry?

Raymond Antrobus Bio

Raymond Antrobus is a poet and former lead educator on the Spoken Word Education MA Programme at Goldsmiths University. Currently he is a one of the London Laureates. Born and bred in Hackney, he is also co-curator of popular London poetry events Chill Pill (Soho Theatre and The Albany) and Keats House Poets Forum. Raymond’s work has appeared on BBC Radio 4, The Big Issue, The Guardian and at TedxEastEnd. As well as respected literary journals such as The Rialto, Magma, Oxford University Diaspora's Programme and Alaska University Press. Sky Arts and Ideas Tap listed Raymond in the top 20 promising young artists in the UK. His second collection - Shapes & Disfigurements Of Raymond Antrobus - is published by Burning Eye Books.
“His monologues are stunning studies of voice and substance, and his lyric poems are graceful and finely crafted” - Kwame Dawes
“Raymond uses nostalgia for a place and a time, but resists sentimentality completely. He makes the reader/listener experience the moment with all the senses and very skilfully sets that up against a harsher reality” – Imtiaz Dharker